2018
2018
An Overview of Internet Marketing | Best SEO Podcasts
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This week, Matt, Aaron, and Adam sat down to discuss internet marketing strategies and some of the tools that eWebResults uses for their clients. Also, Adam and Aaron had a chance to interview Matt and discuss his new book, “Build Your Brand Manina.” TRANSCRIPT:

Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres– Aaron: Welcome to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Aaron!

Matt: My name is Matt Bertram!

Adam: And I am Adam Gregory!

Matt: When the cat’s away the mice will play. Chris is off at the World Cup this week so we decided to take over the microphone and change the format a little bit for this special edition podcast. I wanted everybody to just kind of go around and introduce yourself real quick so they know who’s going to be saying what.

Adam: Alright, so I’m sure everyone’s heard my voice a few times, and I’ve filled in for Matt I know once. Adam Gregory here now.

Matt: The voice!

Adam: The voice! Now an SEO expert.

Matt: Yes.

Adam: And public relations manager here at eWebResults. Aaron: My name is Aaron Weathers, I’m behind the scenes. If any podcast listener has ever called in, I’m on the phone giving great 15-minute calls, giving tips, helping you get those conversions. So that’s a little bit of my job.

Matt: Well great. Well, we just wanted to kind of talk a little bit about what we do and some of the things we’re seeing with a few of the campaigns. We’re going to change the names to protect the innocent, but we are going to talk a little bit about some of the campaigns we’re running in some different niches to maybe give you guys some ideas. And then we’re going to go into kind of an interview format for the book. I have a book launching, I believe it is tomorrow. So I’m pretty excited about that, I know we’ve talked about it a little bit. And we’re going to launch a new podcast format. We’ve been brainstorming all morning, and we’re going to start focusing on the different blue collar niches, so stay tuned for that. We will advertise that later. So Aaron why don’t you give us a little bit about some of the campaigns you’re working on and some of the things that you’re seeing? Aaron: Well, campaigns, whether it’s on Facebook and AdWords are actually doing well. We were looking at one today for an OBGYN and we got one of their add groups actually converting at about 17%. They’re getting leads at 17% conversions – that’s name, email and phone number. And it took a lot of work, it took about three months to get it up and going, to get it humming pretty good.

Matt: And what are the best converting keywords? Aaron: The best converting keywords? For OBGYN? It’s not only about the keywords, you have to have all three parts of your funnel working. And so you can have the right keywords but if they’re hitting the wrong landing page, or you’re targeting the wrong people, then you’re not going to convert very well. So we run by target offer copy. So they all have to match up. So I can’t give you any magical keywords right now, but if you call in for a 15-minute call, then I’m able to check out your website with a website analysis, I can guarantee you I can get you some good keywords.

Matt: Now that’s one of the things that I’ve seen the most when people call in, is maybe their AdWords campaign might be running or humming along well, they’re not usually tracking their goals. Aaron: Right.

Matt: They’re not usually doing remarketing. Also their landing page that they’re running it to is usually not like a squeeze page or an offer page or an offer page. You want to kind of speak to that a little bit? Aaron: Well typically when people call in, businesses are calling in all the time. We are just checking out their Analytics and a lot of times they don’t even have, like you said, remarketing set up. And remarketing is super powerful because it gives you another opportunity to talk to the same audience. And so you know, the basic sales process you have to talk to somebody six, seven, eight times to make a sale, well that’s what remarketing gives to you. So you don’t want to throw out your AdWords dollars into hitting new customers because you can talk to the old ones again. So that’s the first thing that– the easiest thing that people can do. If you don’t have that remarketing pixel on your website, you need to get it as– like right on this podcast. You realize in this podcast, put your remarketing pixels on there right now.

Matt: Yeah like really guys, remarketing it takes about 30 days to get enough traffic to actually start showing it. So you want to do that and start collecting the data now on the different platforms you want to use to remarket. Whether it’s LinkedIn, or Facebook, or AdWords, or Bing, or even Twitter, you really want to think in advance with internet marketing and establish that foundation early. Remarketing packages is one of the biggest things that we recommend for small businesses to do. The other big thing we recommend, Adam if you could speak to it a little bit, is our SEO local package. So could you speak to a little bit of what you’re seeing with some of our big clients related to SEO?

Adam: So with SEO, and SEO local in general, it’s like 85% of people who are searching for something on the web, you know, they’re searching for that local business. And so with SEO local we’re able to put you right there in front of the viewers who are searching for what it is you’re looking for. And of course it goes back to keywords and everything, but SEO local is such a great–

Matt: Well just going to go into it a little bit more guys on what our SEO package includes, we do a lot of optimization with your Google My Business, whether you know it or not, they continue to change things.

Adam: Yes, constantly.

Matt: You can add videos, you can add pictures. And really when you’re adding pictures, you want to add three pictures of your team, three pictures of outside of your building, three pictures of the inside, and maybe even three pictures of the types of service or work that you offer. You want to label everything properly. They’ve also added a new option I believe is in January or February, where you can start adding blogs to that.

Adam: So, and to kind of go off that is, you can also add the post as well. So it’s almost like you can use Google My Business as like a social media platform. And I’ve seen more and more people not doing it, they’re not leveraging that, and so I’ve gone in using one of our third party tools and done it. So now I can actually track to see how many people are actually coming in and clicking the “Learn More,” or “Buy It Now,” and it’s working.

Matt: There’s also opportunities guys, to put offers on there. And really if you’re running an Groupon add or you’re doing something like that, have a tracking code, but you can drive a lot of traffic to your business through offers. Google is trying to help you sell stuff to a degree. Aaron: Yeah.

Matt: I mean they want your clicks. Aaron: Organically.

Matt: And one of the tips that I’ve talked about in a previous podcast is, using your Google keyword planner only shows you a bid words or AdWords that people are bidding on, they don’t show you the full perspective on where you might be getting your traffic. So if there’s little honey holes for organic, you’re not going to see that in AdWords and you want to use some of these other third party tools to do that. Aaron: Yeah, definitely. Even going back to the OBGYN campaign, those keywords were not converting on OBGYN. So there are other keywords that people were searching that were no, “Hey, I’m looking for an OBGYN near me.” The keywords were completely unbranded if you will, or they weren’t searching directly for the professional keyword. And so that’s an important thing. And also we’re talking about the Google My Business, any time Google releases something you want to take notice and you want to be on it.

Adam: Yup.

Matt: Yes. Aaron: So if you have the post, you can put promotionals on there, the pictures, you can put video in there as well. It’s just going to make your map listing that much bigger, and allow you to get more visibility. So that’s something that you really wanna add in the next couple of weeks.

Matt: So there’s a lot of things that we do for SEO local. We build the NAP listings, the Name, Address, Phone Number listings for some of the high-domain authority sites. We also do that for social. Adam, can you highlight maybe some of the top domain authority sites that you’ve created listings on recently?

Adam: Of course you caught me off guard. So Hot frog is one that I’ve been using to place a lot of businesses that have come to us in citations. I think that domain authority is up there in the seventies. And it’s a really, really good site. But you can also– there’s great tools. If you go into Moz, you can actually search for NAP listings for your industry and it’ll give you like the top 15. And of course you can do a Google search and find even more listings, but that’s the thing too is there’s all these industry citation pages that you can use as well. So use both, because if you’re a lawyer– like I’ve found hundreds of different sites for lawyers, for them to go in. And most of our clients don’t have– they have like the top 10, but then there’s so many more that the need to be placing their businesses into as well.

Matt: Guys, we did a little bit of conversation on a few of the podcasts about anchor text and people were like, “Hey, I just want someone to list my– you know give me a backlink.” I can tell you, before you start doing outreach– and really our SEO local package fits in before we start doing active outreach, you can probably build 50 or 100 links by building these profiles pages and linking back to your site. Yes, some of them are going to be nofollow, but it’s going to build trust.

Adam: You want those nofollow links. Aaron: Yes, Google’s still tracking nofollow links, definitely.

Matt: So that’s just something to keep in to consideration. Any time clients come to us, we recommend they do an SEO local audit and and then do a package. We ask that they setup their Analytics and all their goals, and get ready to kind of get into the internet marketing game.

Adam: And something me and you have talked about multiple times on backlinks too, for maybe not so much anchor text is Google has all these great tools as well, and we kind of hit on that. Like you can go in, create a spreadsheet, put what it is, put your backlinks in there, maybe use Bitlead to break them up a little bit, and then publish it to web, and Google’s going to index that. I mean it’s something we’ve talked about multiple times. And it’s such a great tool that nobody thinks about using stuff like that.

Matt: So what Adam’s talking about is something called Google Property Stacking. If you do some research out there, it’s pretty straight forward. It’s using the domain authority of Google to give you a little bit more juice, right? So what is the domain authority of a Google site? Would you like that link? Whether it’s follow or do not follow. You can build those links. Also on page strategies, people go off page super quickly with thin content a lot of times, and that’s where you’re going to get dinged. You want to fully build out your website or your pages with a lot of content: 500, 1000, 1500 words. You want to make sure that the tag titles, the meta descriptions, the images are all labeled properly. Make sure that everything on the back end is set up in the right way, and then you can build those links on-page like through siloing strategies. You’re pointing something with the page authority and then the domain author– domain authority and then the page authority to different things. So if your website’s 35 domain authority, you have had that page for a long time, and then now you update that content, point it to a new page on your site and reindex that, Google’s going to look at that and look those link as more power to wherever you’re pointing it to. So typically we have money pages that on-page and the blogs all point up to. It’s called a siloing strategy. Then when you start moving off-page, of course use the 20+ different platforms and services that Google has for your advantage. Then build all these citations. It’s really a foundational strategy before you start doing more of the aggressive and creative SEO, that’s the steps you want to go through, and that’s what we do for all of our clients. So I actually have a 90-day plan for everyone that comes in of all the things they get. There’s definitely some other bits of secret sauce we throw in there to make sure you rank well. Aaron: Don’t tell them.

Matt: But you call in and you do a profit plan, we will give you everything. You know we’re an educational-base company, so we want to help you out.

Adam: Oh I was just going to caveat what you’re saying, talking about content. When you are creating these citation pages, make sure you’re creating new content for each page.

Matt: Yes.

Adam: I see this on a lot of to the clients: they’re already on all these citation pages, but nothing’s ranking because all the content is the same.

Matt: And that’s a caveat. So there’s a lot of these services out there that will autopopulate things for you, and what we found, that a lot of times depending on the services you use, those citations won’t rank. So if you’re using these services and your citation doesn’t rank, it means that you’re not getting any SEO or SEO juice from Google. So it has to rank, it has to be– well, it has to index. Let me say that more appropriately. It has to index if you’re going to get any kind of juice from it. So we do all our things manually here with unique content, and so over about 70% typically, our citations will index. Aaron: Yes, and just speaking on content, I know Matt said you need 500 to 1000 of words of content, we’re talking about blogs. I just heard the podcast listeners just cringe like, “I’m not a writer, I don’t like to write content.” Well here’s a little hack if you don’t like to write content and you’re a business owner out there. Here’s all you need to do: record yourself talking about the subject. You can talk about it for 5 to 10 minutes. It’s usually easy for somebody to talk about a subject than to write about it, if that’s not something you like to do. And then go take that recording and get it transcribed. Get it transcribed and then gets somebody to edit it, and that’ll be your blog. That’s an easy way to do a blog. You can talk about it forever and it works really well.

Matt: Google loves questions. We’re ranked right now 1st for PPC Houston. What is PPC? We’re also in the snipped. Google likes questions, 90% of searches on Google are question-based searches. So only about 10% of people are looking to buy and there’s different platforms for that, ie Amazon. Which my book is about to be launched on, but really Google likes answering questions. So think of the most commonly asked questions, have a Q&A page on your website. A lot businesses that come to us don’t have that. I really think that if you take into consideration and implement some of these steps we’ve talked about here today, you will be far and above shoulders– what is the–? Aaron: Head and shoulders?

Matt: Head and shoulders above the rest. Aaron: Above it, hell yeah.

Matt: So please give us a call in today, we’d love to do a profit plan with you. It’s 100% money back guarantee. You can apply that against our services. Everyone that’s done has got a ton of value. Really take the risk– Aaron: There is no– we’re taking the risk!

Matt: There is no– yeah. We’re taking the risk to know that we can bring value to you. We just want to know that you’re serious, so please call in today we’d love to talk to you.

Adam: Alright. So let’s move forward now. Everyone’s always wanted to know– we always get a question, “Well, what did Matt do before internet marketing?” Where’d the book come– where’d the idea of the book come from? There’s so much. And so I wanted to sit down and have a one-on-one, although Aaron is here with us as well. So kind of–

Matt: A two-on-one. Aaron: Two-on-one, yes. Yes.

Adam: And even me, I’ve worked with Matt for 4 months now, and I know a little bit about him but there’s always times like when we’re sitting in training–

Matt: Have I talked to you a lot?

Adam: Oh my God, yes. Yesterday he called me an SEO Expert so. But you know it’s like he’s always training me, and so I always get to learn a lot about him, but there’s always more that I want to know. And I think the listeners are the same way. They want to know more about you, and what your background is and again, why the book? So let’s start off. Tells the audience obviously a little bit about yourself, your background, and I’ll just let you start.

Matt: Okay. I am about to be a new papa. Aaron: Ah! Happy fathers day!

Adam: Congrats, congrats.

Matt: So we’re in the red zone here, in under 30 days. Aaron: About to score a touchdown.

Matt: I have my phone with me at all times. Also, I have 10 cats and two dogs. My wife doesn’t like me to share that. We had some cats that had a litter and just decided to keep all the kittens. You know, they were all brothers and everything. But a little bit about myself, I really just have a passion for internet marketing. I really started off back in my early twenties. My mom was actually one of the first employees of Microsoft, so I got to see the internet grow. I got to see the vision. Back in the day – imagine this – back in the day they said that there was going to be a computer in every household and every living room. That was actually the goal, was to get into every living room. So I’ve really just kind of followed the internet along the way. From Texas A&M into my first role. I ran a staffing company with a lot of success for about 10 years and I sold that a while back. And then kind of transitioned to this. I don’t know specifically what you wanted to know.

Adam: So you talked about obviously you had success with this company, how come you had success with that company?

Matt: Well I guess I always as an entrepreneur wanted to have something that I had a phone and a computer and I could work anywhere in the world. Really that was kind of one the prerequisite for a business or a career path that I wanted to go down, right? I also wanted something that was portable that I could take with me, where I was really building a skill set. And so the first thing that I came across was headhunting, right? I’m really surprised actually there’s not more of those like at home classes, you know? Like buy this package, teach you how to start recruiting firm, because it kind of started that way. People think of it as not as maybe a true industry, which I truly believe it is and there’s a lot of money in it. But the view point I had from some of my friends and family was, “Go get a real job.” You’re just like finding people jobs, that’s not a job, you know? And being all commission, really challenging, right? So if you don’t have anybody that you’re placing, you don’t have a paycheck, right? So you have to build up enough volume, and you have to build up kind of the “Numbers Game” to have the leads com in, to know that you’re going to start placing and converting. And I can tell you if you only have one or two deals up and nothing’s closed, you’re like, “This is the worst job in the world.” Now you have 10, 20 deals up and 5 of them pop and you take 20 to 25% of their salary. It’s the best job in the world. I can tell you here in Houston – focused on the oil and gas industry, worked with the operators, the up shore operators – starting to place people offshore because it’s all based on a percentage of salary. I pulled the lead engineer out of GE Oil & Gas and put him at a client of mine, and I made $100 thousand.

Adam: Wow.

Matt: This guy was making $500 thousand a year. So it’s a really high ticket item. I could work, do a couple deals, take off a couple months. When I got serious and I was really going at it in my twenties, started to really ramp it up. And we did about $850 thousand my first year. And I had worked at another agency to kind of learn the ropes, if you will. Right? But did $850 thousand then grew it to about $4 Million and then got bought out pretty quickly. I think that headhunting is– Aaron: No. I was actually about to ask you a question. I know we talked about it before, but let me know a little bit– or let the listeners know a little bit about kind of you used to get deals? And the number of calls you used make? And how often you used to follow up? And I think that’s really important because you know, we always have to coach our customers the fortunes and the follow-ups. So let us know a little bit about that.

Matt: Yeah, no. I think one of the reasons I gravitated to internet marketing as well, is I was making 50 to 60 calls a day. They were all cold calls.

Adam: Wow.

Matt: And it was just grinding out the phone. And it was trying to find that needle in a haystack.

Adam: Which – just to tell our listeners – he does that here as well. I share a desk right next to him and I hear him on the phone quite a bit.

Matt: That is very rare when I do that.

Adam: I take the list of follow ups that we’ve had. We really drive a lot of our traffic through inbound marketing, but to follow up with people, absolutely I can do it pretty rapidly. But yeah, so I was doing cold calls every day, all day, trying to get someone looking to make a move. And so I had to get really good on the phone with understanding what people’s needs are, what they were trying to accomplish, building rapport with them, and then moving them through the process. And I can tell you after 8-10 years, it gets a little old and wears on you. And so I started looking at a way to start creating inbound marketing, right? To start bringing people to you, attraction marketing. And that was one of the things that I saw with internet marketing pretty rapidly. Actually early on I started to use email automation for outbound outreach, or cold email marketing before– Aaron: Spam?

Matt: Yeah, spam. Aaron: You mean spam?

Matt: Spam. Aaron: Okay, okay. Just making sure, just want to be clear.

Matt: Before the rules came down too hard. Also like I was recruiting when LinkedIn started and anybody that was putting their information on LinkedIn I knew was looking for a new job and I had alerts set up. And someone would put it on there, I would call and they needed a job, I would place them and that was worth quite a bit to me. But really it was this slow kind of transition where I was trying to do things as a salesperson and I could only do so much or had so much bandwidth, and I can only call so fast, I could only talk to so many people. So sending out mass emails, right? Sending out a big group of mass emails and then calling the follow-ups over here, and I started to have kind of the system that I worked through. Also from the inbound standpoint I got to a point where I tried a couple different formats of each step of the call, and I found stuff that worked 80% of the time. So then I just kind of started saying that or something else, and then when I started training people I could them what they needed to say to move people through that “Sales Funnel.” Really you got marketing on the front end and then you got sales on the back end, and I was in that gray area where I was fully into the sales side of it, but I was trying to grab more and more into the marketing side because it created a lot leverage.

Adam: So you talked about obviously being an entrepreneur and after. I’ve followed so many different guys, and I look, and I even look at like my father-in-law and see where he’s failed. What are some of your failures? Or one, you know? And I don’t mean it like that. I mean like what’s happened that’s failed that’s, “Oh okay, I’ve got to pick myself up, you know?”

Matt: Yeah, no. I really think that one of the turning points in my life that led me to where I am today was one of my greatest failures. I had decided that the cold calling was getting a little old and I was starting to see some of the advantages from emails, as well as like AdWords. There was some really– I was starting to see some things now. The staffing industries back still stuck in the 1950s. Now there’s some really high-speed staffing agencies out there, so I’m not talking to them, but I’m just saying the industry as a whole still operates a certain way. There’s certain metrics that you use and they tend to work today. Well with all that being said, I started to move more and more away from it, I started to see what Monster did. I saw the kind of rise and fall of Monster. I saw the aggregators come into effect. With Indeed I went to some conferences out in Las Vegas, started to get connected in with the people that started ZipRecruiter, and that sort of things. So I decided to build my own aggregator for the healthcare space, and I started to get into some very high-end IT work. As well as internet marketing work that were well beyond what I knew, right? But I had made a bunch of money, I had just sold this company. So I was just throwing money at it. I had thrown about $100 thousand at this thing before I started to really go, “This is not working.” And really the path of like: why is this not working for me? Has led me to where I am today, and that’s what really kind of the reason I started the book. It’s kind of like a journaling of my story. Like I just kind of kept notes of what I went through, and what I had to learn, and where I went to that. And also I read a lot, as you all know I read typically about a book every two weeks now. It was every week, I also listen to books on tape, and actively read a lot of different blogs and stay up to date with what’s going on with the podcast and everything. Now this massive amount of information is really hard if you’re a layperson to try and put it together and piece it together. And so I had to really think about– just like when I built out own custom SEO strategy of how do I put this together where I can teach somebody else? Because that’s how you scale a business, that’s how you grow a business, is you got to find something that’s replicatable. And so as I started to grow in the inbound marketing and the internet marketing, and taking more and more of my day, I just started to chronicle it. Just like every time we’re finding new citations, we’re building that list. And so I just decided: hey, I’ll put this list together and a lot of people ask me that question so much. How do I build myself as a brand? How do I grow my internet marketing? How do I build my business online? How do I generate leads online? All those types of questions, I get that. And a lot of the people that we’re talking to are micro-businesses or entrepreneurs, as well as small and medium-sized business owners. And that’s the predominant question I get is, “How do I build my brand online?” So I just decided to take all the information I had, all the knowledge I had, and put it together in a step by step format in the book.

Adam: Were there anyone that like influenced you on the book?

Matt: Oh yeah. I mean avid reader. Seth Godin has probably influenced me the most. Beyond that Dan Kennedy and Perry Marshall. Dan Kennedy has so many great books out there. He’s has actually written a book about all these different niches. He’s kind of like the Godfather in the direct marketing space. So I was really.. I would say classically trained in like direct marketing. And really the internet is just really a strong application of that. Just like with the mail, they know their numbers, right? From David Oglesby and what he did in advertising, he was also a big proponent of the direct marketing agency, and I mean Russell Brunson I almost feel like has kind of stepped into the mantel or the next generation. Let me say that, the next generation for the Dan Kennedy. I’ve read all his books. Of course you can’t find a blog online that’s not– or a topic online about internet marketing that you’re not going to run across Neil Patel.

Adam: True.

Matt: You know, really amazing. I’ve read all Perry Marshall’s books as well. Ryan Deiss who is based out of here in Austin is great. Even Brian Horn, a buddy that I’m writing the book– he wrote a foreword in the book. Fantastic with authority marketing, he’s here in Houston. So there’s just really a lot of excellent mentors out there, but it’s really taking the knowledge that they teach you and it’s that application, right? And that’s the key. It’s starting to do it. Putting it in writing, putting it in action, putting it in paper and getting the ball moving, because the internet is a lot like investing in a newity or something like that. Like there’s compound interest in every link, in every website as it grows, as it ages online, the more– like Quora for example.

Adam: Oh yeah.

Matt: I mean I think I’ve answered maybe only like 50-something questions on Quora and I’m getting over 6000 or 7000 views a week, you know? And over time more and more people see it, and that’s just like this podcast. More and more people find it over time, so you want to put that shingle out there and say, “Hey, this is what I do, this is what I’m offering.” And really this podcast in a lot of ways is a byproduct of what we do as a service to our customers. Really, we’re just talking about our experience of what we’re currently doing, and that was really what gave me the idea to write the book is: people were already asking me this, let me just kind of start writing down how to do this.

Adam: So what do you hope the readers get out of your book? You know, someone reads something and you’re like, “Oh man, that–” I mean, are you hoping they learn something? Are you hoping they’re able to build their brand? Or what is your–?

Matt: Yeah. I really think that the new economy, “The new economy,” has changed how people generate business and how people do business. Attraction marketing and one-on-one marketing– like the internet you’re talking directly to somebody. They’re sitting in front of their phone, they’re sitting in front of their computer. You have the opportunity to talk directly to them. Long-form sales letters or those– you know, long copy on the internet is like your salespersons and you want to answer all your rejections, you want to do that. Now, using the internet to generate new business for yourself and becoming an authority in your space is really the key component, or really the crux of what I want to express. And you don’t have to do that just through the internet, it’s just the easiest place to do that because it doesn’t cost anything but your time, right? There’s definitely paid strategies that we can get into at a later date, but it only costs your time. Facebook’s like an endless cocktail party, right? You’ve probably maybe heard that before. You can get on Facebook and you can go into those groups about those different niches and find people you’re interested in, start a conversation with them through direct message, just like you would at any networking function. Now if you’re not good in public networking and you don’t want to approach people, same thing’s going to translate to internet. One: not as much rejection, right? But two is: you can’t be shy. People on Twitter, super friendly when you get involved in the different communities when you have common interests. I know you Adam in the veteran’s community.

Adam: Yeah.

Matt: Very active. There’s a lot of bonding that happens and people are starting to organize themselves online and based on topics that they’re passionate about. And so you can get involved in those topics, you can start sharing your expertise. I’ve seen this a lot in gaming. And I’d really think that the next generation of kids with gaming, they’re going be experts.

Adam: Yeah.

Matt: Like I talked to this guy the other day on the phone. He’s published a few books, okay? Like little bitty e-books and stuff like that, but has done a lot with Minecraft. Like so he’s like an expert in Minecraft. Aaron: Minecraft expert.

Matt: He’s like an authority in Minecraft and you know, that’s really what the book goes through. It’s kind of the psychology, the different platforms, what you need to do to build yourself as an authority – really on and offline – but I lean in a little bit more towards internet marketing because I think you can create a lot of leverage.

Adam: Aaron I believe you had a question for Matt? Aaron: Yeah, tell us– I know you’ve been here at eWeb for a little while now. Kind of tell us the backstory on that, why you chose eWeb and kind of the evolution now to the podcast, and now into the book?

Matt: Yeah. I think that really how we intersected was one: it’s 5 minutes from my house.

Adam: I always hear that. That’s the joke.

Matt: But you know, Chris was looking to restructure the company. I mean he’d been in business for 18 years. Started off as e-WebStyle, really strong at building websites, a lot of capabilities there. As time went on people said, “Oh, great website. Love the digital brochure, now how do I get traffic to this website?” Right? And so he even recently changed the name to eWebResults, so a lot of you know us maybe as e-WebStyle or e-WebStyle.com. Aaron: Hey don’t [00:35:41] [Indiscernible]

Matt: And really that’s something with SEO is having a dash or an underscore separating it out for Google to recognize it’s different words, so that is proper protocol. But yeah, so really looking to rebrand the company, really focusing more on lead generation efforts. One of his tried and true is he’s not going to hire anybody that hasn’t spent their own money on campaigns, because you want somebody to work on your campaigns that has felt the pain– Aaron: Of losing.

Matt: Of losing, and not working out. As you know Aaron, Johan, I mean both of you had spent your own money when I brought you on, and so yeah, Chris was looking for some hiring. I had initially joined up to help him with some PPC because I was like knee-deep in that and his PPC guy was leaving. And we started to look at everything and just decided that it would be better to have me as the COO and give me some equity in the company. And really the format of building it is we’ve hired everyone the same way I hired in my staffing firm. And we’re building pods and people’s books of business, and really like an intrapreneurial versus entrepreneurial. So I’m looking for entrepreneurs that want to have a playground and have a structure, and we’re growing really effectively through that. And so we’ve added a lot of capabilities, we’re really cutting edge in what we’re doing. We’re doing a lot of geofencing, we’re doing some Facebook bots, we’re doing email marketing, programmatic ad buying, as well as all the fundamentals. We’re certified in a lot of the major platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce and that sort of thing.

Adam: Can we back up for one second?

Matt: Sure.

Adam: You talked about hiring, and obviously you hired all of us. Aaron: Yes.

Adam: You know, it’s kind of like you– and I hear you say it all the time, you’ve built this team, and you’ve trained them and whatnot. I’m trying to think of the question to go back to and how to word it, but what are your thoughts on the hiring and how–? Aaron: Talk to business owners. Tell them what to look for, how to build a cohesive team.

Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt: Yeah. As a headhunter and moving into kind of the job board space and that sort of thing, the question I always got was: I need to hire and I need marketing. I need to hire and I need marketing. If they have marketing and they need to hire, they still want marketing. But hiring is really something that not everybody does every day, right? And even interviewing for jobs is something that not everybody does every day. So it’s really a skill set. So sitting in that kind of space, or in that hiring mode for almost 10 years, you really get good at what to look for, what kind of questions to ask, and it’s really about your company culture and what you’re trying to create. Is that person going to be a fit for the team? Is it going to be a fit for the culture? Do they have the work ethic? Do they have the capabilities to learn what you can teach them, right? I also believe that you can hire talent. Right? You can pay a lot and you can hire some excellent talent, but know that they’re going to come in with their own kind of way of doing things, or you can hire them and train them, and grow from within. And it really depends what you’re looking for. I think going back to just recruiting for a second. If you’re looking for something in particular and you’re looking at someone’s résumé, if they cannot articulate in the résumé exactly what they did, and you can see the connection for what you need done– and I’m talking more white collar jobs, right? Like blue collar, a little bit different. Some of the welders and stuff like that don’t always have résumés. But if they can’t articulate what they’ve done and numbers and that sort of thing in the résumé, they probably aren’t going to be able to articulate it in person. And if they’re on the bubble and you bring them in, they got to be able to articulate what they did. And you’ve got to able to see the parallels from what you need and what they can do. I mean I think that that’s probably one of the biggest things that I look for. I also look for– I ask what’s the last three movies you watched? Or what’s the last three books you read, right?

Adam: Yeah, you gave me some crazy questions.

Matt: Well those questions give me an insight into who you are, and to how you think and what you do. Like Aaron for example had read some of the same books I had read, right? So I already know that if I’m going to teach a concept that I’ve learned or want to implement, right? He is on board with that same thinking, right? Another little tip and trick that I’ve done for definitely small businesses– for the big businesses, they come up to the 20th floor and you’re never going to be able to see their car, but walking them out and walking them to their car, and then looking in their car. And if their car’s a mess, typically they’re unorganized potentially. Like let me just put that nicely.

Adam: I kind of have something funny to say. My mom dated a headhunter years ago, and something that he did was they would go out to lunch first, and if they salted their food before they tasted it, he wouldn’t recommend them or hire them.

Matt: Really? Aaron: That’s a good one.

Adam: She said it was based off like, he hadn’t even tried his food–

Matt: So he doesn’t know.

Adam: So he doesn’t know and they’re already salting it.

Matt: It’s not thoughtful, yeah.

Adam: Yeah.

Matt: And it hurts the cook’s feelings.

Adam: So not to get off subject, but I think that those are good things in looking.

Matt: Yeah, and when you’re doing hiring too, you want to really have in mind like that– for marketing same thing goes, like the persona. You got to understand what you’re looking for because you’re going to like a lot of thing that walk in the door. So if you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to fill, and what you need– it’s a lot like with clothes, women and clothes. Men and clothes too, but if you buy everything that you like, you’re going to have a bunch of like blue shirts or something. You know what I mean? You’re going to have all of one thing. You need to know what you’re hiring for, and what skill sets that person needs to have, and how that’s going to fit into your team. Also, if you want to save money you don’t need to hire a headhunter, not with LinkedIn and some of the other tools online. You can go search for what you want and pick up the phone and call them. That goes same way for people that are looking for a job. JaMarcus, that’s how– Aaron: Yeah, he did call in.

Matt: He called us, and he kept on us as we were through our hiring process with some other, and finally we interviewed him, and hired him.

Adam: Yup.

Matt: It goes both ways, and you’ve got to understand online it connects you with so many people. You can send a message through Facebook for free to anybody, right? The power of connectivity is here and people are generally friendly. If you know how to interact with people in person, you know how to interact with people online. Does that–?

Adam: No, no, that’s–

Matt: I think that those are probably a few things. I can’t think off the top of my head. Aaron: You need to go ahead and write a hiring book. Next up a hiring book.

Matt: Well you know, like you said we actually had with clients, when we’re generating cold leads for them– warm leads are a little bit easier but cold leads, we have to step a little bit more into the sales process with the recording of the calls, as well as the scripts, and coach them a little bit more because cold leads are a lot harder. The fish – if you want to use that analogy of fish on a a hook – they’re not really hooked really well, you’ve just got them interested, right? Aaron: Right.

Matt: And so cold leads, you really have to put your full sales game on and move them through your process like they were someone you just met, you know? They’re just raising their hands saying, “Hey, I’m interested.” Aaron: Typically what do you recommend for like a business to follow up? Like the calls, the emails, like how often should they kind of do that, what does the system look like?

Matt: so that’s one of the things I learned in recruiting quite a bit, is people are like, “Hey call me in a month,” right? Or “Call me next quarter,” or “Call me in a week.” All they’re really saying is, “I’m busy right now, and I can’t talk.” So if you call them in a day or two, or the next day or whatever, and just use kind of permission-based selling, and ask them, “Hey, is now a good time?” Or if you want to use, what is it? Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference? “Is now not a bad time?” Not a bad time. You can usually get them on the phone. You just got to– and that’s why LinkedIn’s a great format because people are on that platform in the mindset of doing business and networking and that sort of thing. So it’s the right time to ask those sort of questions. Did that answer your question, or not really? Aaron: Yeah, well just that part and like how often? With this cold leads, how often should they [00:45:31] [Indiscernible] I think that’s important.

Matt: Yeah, with cold leads, depending on the cycle and the cadence, it’s really going to depend. If you have someone that’s trying to– for example we have some chiropractor clients that do free exams and then refer them to lawyers. You know, it’s a 3-day cycle and you want to hit them maybe 10 times in those 3 days of multiple different formats. Text, email, remarketing campaigns, that sort of thing. And then maybe even a call or two, right? So it really depends on the campaign, that’s way we customize every campaign, that’s why we put everybody through the profit plan to better understand what they need. Typical rule of thumb, most companies don’t do any kind of follow up and the data– Aaron: At all.

Matt: At all, right? At all. Aaron: Even internet marketing companies. I mean we just had a– you just talked to a client.

Matt: So we’re about to do a Forbes forty under forty, and one of the main reasons he was going with us versus the other companies is all the companies look pretty good online, he didn’t know the difference between all of them. We had email followup, right?

Adam: Yup. Aaron: Like about 10 to 12 email followups.

Matt: So really even instituting something like that is substantially– again, head and shoulders above what other people are doing. It’s those incremental increases where you’re going to really see that impact, but I would recommend– again, it’s dependant on what you’re selling, but email, that same day. An email maybe a week later, you know? Two weeks later, a month later, and then whatever. Like whatever the rotation is, it’s really dependant upon the businesses, but you can send them through these email platforms. You can send them testimonials, you can send them case studies, you can do all kinds of trust building articles. You can build an automated process for your sales team. Get it set and implement it once. Where I’ve seen this help almost the most is with realtors, it’s helped a lot people that are in the phone business, in the cold calling business, in the recruiting business, in the commercial real estate business. When you’re trying to followup with people, you need multiple touch points. I mean the data’s out there that most of the sales don’t happen until after the 5th contact, or the 6th contact, and even the best sales people typically stop at 3. And that again goes back to why I initially go into this business, it’s to create that leverage and to create those touch points when I can’t call them all the time. Even with a lot of the people that I call here and followup with. I called these guy– well two of these people today that we’ve moved over into starting profit plans with us. The last touch point– not he emails, but the last touch point manually on the phone by one of you guys was back in March, but all these people were back in March. So we’re not able to call people as often, but we’re able to touch them multiple ways. Also I can tell you the podcast for us, it generates, I don’t know, 65% of our business. Maybe give or take some.

Adam: Yup.

Matt: But you have to create content, you have to create value, and you have to distribute it whether it’s in blogs or vlogs, whether it’s in podcasts or infographics, whether it’s in interviews or videos. Whatever you do, show people that you’re an expert, build yourself as an authority and then people–60% or I don’t know the number actually. I don’t now the exact statistic, but it’s somewhere around 60% of people, before they even call you, before they even pick up the phone, have done the research and have narrowed it down to a few companies. So you need to put your best foot forward and put as much content as you have out there. We’re actually launching our new site next week, and every about three years you need to update your website. Everyone out there, I think everyone out there. You know, you get going with business and our last update was I think 2012 or something like that. So it a little bit long on the tooth. Kind of cobblers kid’s have no shoes. We’re doing everything for everyone else. Aaron: Working on our clients.

Matt: And got to do it for ourselves. But I got to get going guys, I actually have to head to a funeral, unfortunately. I went to a wedding last night, funeral today. But we are going to start– Chris and I are going to start being on a lot more podcasts, we’re going to do a speaking tour. Chris has already started to gear that up, speaking at local events. So if you guys want to have us on your podcast, or something that you’re doing, please reach out. We are friendly here.

Adam: Yeah.

Matt: We’re very much education oriented. We’ll talk to you, we’ll teach you things every month we go through. MRC call with all of our clients, and show them what’s going on. Aaron: What’s MRC? Let them know what an MRC is.

Matt: Monthly Results Call.

Adam: Yup.

Matt: So we do that, we touch a lot of clients once a week or every other week. So we’re really, really friendly, guys. So please reach out to us if you have a question. We’re happy to help you out. We love helping people. These guys here are great, really love working with everybody. We have onstaff copywriters, everything’s done in-house. Everything is done is in-house, our strategy is in-house, we don’t outsource it, we know what we’re doing. We can give you a lot of value. So give us a call today, setup a free consultation, we’d love to talk to you. BuildYourBrandMania.com, we’re working on finishing the book funnel today.

Adam: Yes, go there.

Matt: The book should launch shortly. Aaron: Go there so we can re-target you!

Matt: But BuildYourBrandMania.com.

Adam: BuildYourBrandMania.com BuildYourBrandMania.com BuildYourBrandMania.com BuildYourBrandMania.com

Matt: And the book will also be available on Amazon, so please check it out. I really appreciate you guys.

Adam: No, Matt seriously thank you for sitting down for the one-on-one. I think it’ll mean a lot to the audience, getting to you know you, now we got to get Chris in here. Aaron: Yes.

Adam: And get a little one-on-one with him.

Matt: Well yeah, and just to reiterate, it’ll be back to your regularly scheduled program next week. Again Chris is out of town, but we are going to start a new format for the podcast. A more interview based format as well as a round table style format. We have been working on that today, we’ll be launching that soon. So please stay tuned for that. Just know that regular scheduled format coming, but new format as well if you have an interest in this style or a round table style.

Adam: Yeah, and you know feel free to reach out. You know, tell us what you think about this podcast. You can hit me up at [email protected]. I’d really appreciate your comments, see what you think about this style of podcast, because this kind of helps us with moving forward with our new podcast that we’ll be launching shortly.

Matt: So this is Matt Bertram. Aaron: Aaron Weathers.

Adam: Adam Gregory.

Matt: Bye bye for now.